SEO is such a young industry but we have seen so many changes in such a small amount of time. The internet has evolved so much that the ever growing catalogue of online shopping now includes cars like Hyundai have introduced. So, how much has SEO changed? There are plenty of guides out there to help with your technical SEO but which ones are up to date and which one should you follow?

Let's explore...Although these do not matter as much, it is still best practice so make sure you have all of this in line!

Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta Robots

Meta Keywords

Header Titles

Page Titles

Opportunities - The main objective of SEO is to make yourself as outstanding to search engines as possible. Relevancy is key so there is no point fighting for red dresses as a keyword when you only sell shoes.

Mobile ExperienceAlthough society is moving close and closer to mobile, it is not the main factor you should be thinking about but it is something that should put major consideration. User behaviour has changed rapidly and users have less patience than they used to so if your site is hard to use on a mobile device then there is a high possibility that they will leave your site and not convert. However, don't write off desktop just yet, this is still very much in use, especially for those at office jobs!

Schema MarkupThis type of markup is sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. They are extensible schema's that enables webmasters to embed structured data on their sites for use by search engines and applications. By adding these snippets of codes to your site, you can help search engines understand clearly what your website is about and match it with the relevancy of the search query.

Link BuildingAs mentioned in our previous blog post, this will always be key in our opinion. The best tip is to ensure that you choose quality over quantity or you may be penalised or this. Just like with social media, if you suddenly get a boost of 1000's of followers then most likely your existing followers will suspect you of buying followers. When Instagram did a huge clean out of fake followers, it was evident who had fake followers as the amount of followers a person would have dropped drastically.

User ExperienceAlthough not technically falling under SEO, user experience is becoming more and more important. The easier a users journey is, the more you and the user will benefit. Amazon are a great example of this with its one click feature and in addition the checkout page doesn't have a back button so some users are persuaded to carry on with the purchase.

Local SEO There are some services that require you to be within reaching distance of the user. Such as, click and collect services or even handy man services so if you are targeting local consumers then this is a must. When implementing local SEO, IP address location will be taken into consideration if it is set on the browser so this is another way to increase your chances for visibility.

Open Graph TagsThis protocol was launched by Facebook. It enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. Although social signals are not officially an extremely strong signal, it is worth noting that it is still worth implementing as an added extra. One day, this may become a signal so it is worth being prepared to stop your visibility from dropping drastically!

Whilst these are newer techniques that SEOs focus on, remember that Google can change the way that it works instantly. There is no definitive guide on how to do SEO so the best advice is to follow the community and see what the hot gossip is!